Alice Raphael

Author and translator Alice Pearl Raphael was born in Brownsville, Texas on June 22, 1887. She attended Barnard College and studied music in Germany. Raphael also spent time living in Zurich, where she studied psychoanalysis with Carl Jung and Fritz Wittels. Raphael practiced as a lay psychoanalyst for several years. She would later found the Analytical Psychology Club of New York. She was also a member of the Society for Psychical Research and gave lectures at the New York Institute of the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology. In the 1920s, while living in Washington, Connecticut, she studied drawing. 

In 1932, Raphael published Parts One and Two of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: A Tragedy (The Heritage Press), which she translated with her friend, the scholar Carl F. Schreiber. In her next book, Goethe and the Philosopher’s Stone: Symbolical Patterns in ‘The Parable’ and the Second Part of ‘Faust’ (Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1965), Raphael analyzed Goethe’s work in the context of Jungian theory. Raphael is featured in Kahlil Gibran’s Twenty Drawings, in which Gibran drew a charcoal portrait of her. Raphael lived in Manhattan for most of her life and died there on August 27, 1975.